Friday, December 11, 2015

Kareem v. Trump

I've read and relished Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's recent piece on
Donald Trump, not that I agree with every word of it. Kareem writes that
Trump's, "irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric and deliberate propagation
of misinformation have created a frightened and hostile atmosphere that could
embolden people to violence." For sure.

Kareem adds that: "While Trump is not slaughtering
innocent people, he is exploiting such acts of violence to create terror here
to coerce support." I agree again.

It's when Kareem writes that Trump's incendiary speeches
"could be
interpreted as hate crimes" that I draw back. Hateful as they
are, I don't think Trump's pronouncements can or should be treated as crimes. But
then I note that Kareem said "could be
interpreted as hate crimes." He's not so sure either; he's
wondering, as many do, how to counter Trump.

I don't think trying to convict him of criminal activity is
the right way to go, one reason, among many, being it tries to short-circuit
the electoral process and underestimates the ability of voters to see Trump for
what he is. Kareem's essay is, aside from that, verymuch the right way to go. It's sharp and insightful.

Discussing one devout but lonely Christian woman's
conversion to Islamicism, he writes, "Maybe that’s because. . . the
brain’s default setting is simply to
believe because it takes extra work to analyze information."

And Kareem ends with an allusion to Yeats's great poem, The
Second Coming, that gives it topical spin, when he asks, "what rough beast
slouches toward Washington to be born?"

The Second Coming describes a vision Yeats had, more precisely, a nightmare. President
Trump would be a nightmare from which it would take the world a long time to
recover.